I'm a very green Erlang noob, but given what I have seen from it I find articles like this kind of strange. Sure concurrent programming is difficult and we need to think hard about how to make programs run quickly in a multiprocessor environment, but the fundamental architecture of Erlang seems to be in conflict with big data and high speed computing. It seems like a language that can scale much better, but has such enormous constant time penalties that the scaling can't overcome the hurdle until you're talking about thousands of processors.
Every single state change requires a function call, every function call involves a pattern matching algorithm that has to account for all of your program arguments (effectively almost the entire state of your thread!) and isn't even strongly typed. And then there is synchronization and data sharing between threads, which seems a bit handwavy and effectively requires a database running in your program that the threads can poll.
If your problem set is lots and lots of small independent tasks that don't have to finish overly quickly, then Erlang is fantastic. Stuff like switching voice circuits for example. But I'm trying to imagine manipulating a 1TB dataset with thousands of worker threads if you have to make a copy on the stack for every change every worker makes.
I know people do some big data stuff with Erlang, so these have to be solved problems somehow, but I can't help but to suspect that they have to compromise some of the ideals espoused in this article to make it work.
Every single state change requires a function call, every function call involves a pattern matching algorithm that has to account for all of your program arguments (effectively almost the entire state of your thread!) and isn't even strongly typed. And then there is synchronization and data sharing between threads, which seems a bit handwavy and effectively requires a database running in your program that the threads can poll.
If your problem set is lots and lots of small independent tasks that don't have to finish overly quickly, then Erlang is fantastic. Stuff like switching voice circuits for example. But I'm trying to imagine manipulating a 1TB dataset with thousands of worker threads if you have to make a copy on the stack for every change every worker makes.
I know people do some big data stuff with Erlang, so these have to be solved problems somehow, but I can't help but to suspect that they have to compromise some of the ideals espoused in this article to make it work.